Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday March 17, 2009 @08:37PM
from the ooh-shiny dept.

AlienRancher writes "Google launched this morning a new beta version of Chrome 2.0: 'The best thing about this new beta is speed — it's 25% faster on our V8 benchmark and 35% faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version and almost twice as fast when compared to our original beta version.' Other enhancements include user script support (greasemonkey-like) and form auto-fill." And reader Lee Mathews adds news of the open source version, Chromium, on Linux: "Not only has Chromium gotten easier to take for a test drive thanks to the personal package archive for Ubuntu Chrome daily build team, but development on the browser is also progressing nicely. Despite being a very early build, Chromium on Linux feels solid and boasts the same blazing speed the Windows users have been enjoying for months."

Edit your hosts file (theres even one for Windows), and put in all adservers to redirect to localhost. There. No ads, similarly, no extra bloat from Adblock. Plus, it works on whatever, e-mail, browsers, etc.

Edit your hosts file (theres even one for Windows), and put in all adservers to redirect to localhost. There. No ads, similarly, no extra bloat from Adblock. Plus, it works on whatever, e-mail, browsers, etc.

Thanks for the tip. But this has been discussed before on slashdot the problems with the privoxy and host file mechanisms.

Edit your hosts file (theres even one for Windows), and put in all adservers to redirect to localhost. There. No ads, similarly, no extra bloat from Adblock. Plus, it works on whatever, e-mail, browsers, etc.

Thanks for the tip. But this has been discussed before on slashdot the problems with the privoxy and host file mechanisms.

AFAIR Privoxy needs to load the whole page before delivering to the client (that's expected, since it needs the whole stuff in memory in order to analyse it properly).

Anyways, if your problem is restricted to not displaying advertisements, you may try Ziproxy [sourceforge.net].
It's a transcoding proxy (recompresses pictures and other stuff) and it has a number of weird features, one of those being an option which may be used to replace only pictures from a URL list for empty ones. Not really an ad-blocker proxy per se, but it may be used that way.

At least for me, Adblock is much more convenient (though I do use a hosts file to block some of the nastier stuff). It is updated automatically, it lets me whitelist sites, and it's pretty useful for blocking annoying avatars/signatures on forums.

Edit your hosts file (theres even one for Windows), and put in all adservers to redirect to localhost. There. No ads, similarly, no extra bloat from Adblock. Plus, it works on whatever, e-mail, browsers, etc.

While somewhat effective, that's a very crude way of blocking ads. Adblock can block ads and other content based on regular expressions (for example, */ads/*) and can auto-subscribe to a regularly-updated blocklist. I especially like how you can pretty much click on a particular element and say, "here, block this" whether it's an ad or not. And it doesn't really add any noticeable bloat to the browser. My only gripe is that it doesn't support more browsers.

IMHO, you're much better off with an ad-removing proxy like Privoxy [privoxy.org] if you really want to live without a built-in solution like AdBlock. It gives you much finer control over what is and isn't blocked.

Not sure how Google does it but running Chrome gives that feeling of when you get a new computer and all of your old apps seem lighting quick and responsive compared to before.

But it isn't just the incredible speed of Chrome it is the fact that no matter how long you run it still feels exactly as quick and responsive as when you started it up. When I use to run Firefox a few months ago before switching to Chrome I could feel Firefox getting slower and slower and slower as the hours of use ticked by until finally getting annoyed enough to have to quit the app and restart it. Doesn't seem like a big deal but I would end up restarting Firefox three to four times every day just to clear out whatever 'junk' it seems to accumulate.

I thought there were going to be all sorts of extensions I would miss but with Privoxy for ad blocking there isn't anything else that care about. Extensions in Chrome will be nice but so far Chrome + Privoxy is browsing heaven.

Wow, maybe Firefox 1 and 2, but 3 seems to have done away with that problem. I leave Firefox 3 open all the time and never have an issue, and I'm running an oldish computer by today's standards (AMD Athlon 64, AGP GFX, etc).

Not enough importance and effort is given to latency with software. Clicking between tabs, resizing windows, opening/closing tabs, clicking back/forward (which isn't ideal in Chrome btw), opening and closing the software - they all are underrated imo.

ChromeMultithreaded Javascript and code for each tab.Memory protection for each tab so no single tab can take down the browser.Quick and responsive native UI.

IEMultithreaded Javascript and code for each tab.Memory protection for each tab so no single tab can take down the browser.Quick and responsive native UI.

FirefoxAll tabs and Javascript run in one giant mess. One execution heavy tab drags down the performance of the entire browserNo memory protection. Everything is in one gigantic soup of data. One tab crashes, down goes the whole browserClunky and slow crossplatform UI implementation

The latest IE 8's absolutely smoke Firefox in performance and stability. What an absolute humiliation for the Firefox developers. They had years to get their shit together. But they sat on their asses and now they have been left in the technological dust by both Google and Microsoft.

High five Firefox devs!

Well given that that AC's post is technically accurate I don't really think it's a troll. It's true, Firefox failed to advance in many respects, the way it should have giving its high level of funding. It leaks like a sieve, everybody knows that. I too have to restart it every couple of days or it ooms my machine. Keyboard navigation is still very dodgy. It has big problems with spinning on on web pages that konq just loads gracefully. Etc.

Yes, you can say it's better than IE 5/6/7. I don't know about IE 8, jury is out.

Sadly, Firefox developers shifted from "fast and simplified feature set" to "include lots of features to make the web fun & easy." They're working on Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 right now, both of which are feature-driven releases. Astonishingly, the one feature for Firefox 3.5 that makes the release competitive with Chrome & Safari—the new javascript engine, TraceMonkey—was almost cut from the release because it is/was too buggy to fit into their release schedule.

The Mozilla 2.0 [mozillazine.org] project, which is supposed to refactor a good deal of the Gecko code in order to make it leaner and easier to deal with, is not getting much attention at all while the feature-driven point releases consume everyone's attention. Mozilla developers have lost any focus they once had on the fundamentals of browser innovation, and are now given over to the same level of feature bloat that killed the original Mozilla browser (now SeaMonkey). Extensions were supposed to be the solution for this: extra features could be implemented by users so that developers could focus on making the browser faster. Not anymore.

It will not surprise me if the hard core of geeks that abandoned Mozilla Suite for Firefox now abandon Firefox for Chrome and Safari. The first one of those browsers to get an extensions/plugin framework allowing for ad-blocking and development tools will start sucking a lot of folks over.

It will not surprise me if the hard core of geeks that abandoned Mozilla Suite for Firefox now abandon Firefox for Chrome and Safari.

I don't think it will be the geeks that will abandon Firefox first, I think it'll be the casual users. Here's a browser that 1) is visibly much faster, and 2) is from a well-known brand. And... "adblock"? what's "adblock"?

Plugins will surely follow, nonetheless. Maybe not in Chrome per se, but hey, it's OSS for a reason...

On the Linux front things are interesting, too. Gnome is slowly but steadily moving to WebKit [gnome.org] for all its HTML rendering needs, including Epiphany. From what I heard, KDE4 is also going to

Except it's not accurate, as threads!=processes. Chrome and IE8 are multiprocess, but Firefox has to be multithreaded. Here, a random search on bugzilla turns up this bug [mozilla.org] which is directly related to multithreading - there's no reason a program would lock on a semaphore if it wasn't multithreaded. Or this one [mozilla.org], race conditions are solely a problem with multithreaded applications.

Also, Chrome and IE are the only browsers with any meaningful sandboxing. Chrome actually leads the pack with multiple sandbox mechanisms on Vista where it uses its own sandbox and in addition to that the Vista low integrity process mode (same as IE protected mode).

Firefox now holds the dubious honor of being the browser with the most vulnerabilities. I believe that this fact along with no sandboxing (no mitigation of vulnerabilities) and a rising market share will mean that it is only a matter of time be

The "Linux" Chrom(ium) is 32-bit only, and everything indicates it is also Linux-only, meaning they just replaced crappy platform-dependent WinAPI code with not-less-crappy Linux code. Wake me up when I can compile Chrapmium on OpenBSD.

There is no way you can compare a visualbasic gui slapped on top of WebKit with a full-featured cross-platform browser like firefox. Process separation sounds like a good idea now that everyone has crappy code that crashes every now and then.

I would rather Firefox developers focusing in making the code more stable and threadable instead of adding unneeded process overhead.

Chrome is very responsive, but come on, IE 7 is slow as hell !Try to use about:blank as the start page, and you'll see that it takes around 2-3 seconds to start, with a message saying that it starts to connect !Its Javascript engine is super slow, so using GMail is a PITA. As a developer, I have encountered nasty bugs in IE (like authentication problems, that need to reset the preferences !), so I don't trust this browser.

I didn't test IE8, since I never install MS betas anymore. Having tested a few of their hard-to-remove products was enough for me.

Anyway, I agree that Firefox gets worse and worse, not because of the memory isolation (who cares ?), but because it's slow to start.Anyway, the plugins definitely make it the best browser experience !

Chrome is very fast and nice, but if you wait for AdBlock, it's like waiting for TV channels to stop ads.

Frankly, you should stop using speed as a reason to use a browser.The main point now is TRUST.I trust in Firefox+AdBlock+NoScript more than any other browser.

The wish of many users comes true: We integrated an Adblocker in Iron!
With a filterlist so nearly all online-advertising can be blocked. A working list can be downloaded here and just has to be copied to the Iron folder (e.g: C:\Program Files\SRWare Iron\). Note: You must first get the latest version of Iron you can find under "Downloads".
So Iron is the first Chromium based webbrowser worldwide which has an adblocker included.

And... SRWare Iron has a proper installer - per default it installs in "C:\Program Files", which is where applications belong.

That's not proper. Per default it should install to %ProgramFiles%, which is often C:\Program Files, but not always. The user local location is a good safe place to install for most apps, especially beta versions. We really need to get away from the Windows "The only user is me, and I can do anything!" mentality that causes so many problems.

That's not proper. Per default it should install to %ProgramFiles%, which is often C:\Program Files, but not always.

SRWare Iron already defaults to %ProgramFiles%. On a German Windows it suggests C:\Programme as installation location. I guess the GP poster simply didn't notice the difference because he's using an English Windows.

The user local location is a good safe place to install for most apps, especially beta versions. We really need to get away from the Windows "The only user is me, and I can do anything!" mentality that causes so many problems.

While I agree in principle, there's a "portable" Iron version for download, which will keep its profiles in the same folder as the application. It's meant for installations on removable media, but it's also extremely useful for testing. To me this seems like a much more end-user-transparent sol

Well I found out how to do it. I do not have ads anymore in chrome...
Go here and follow instructions :
http://www.adsweep.org/ [adsweep.org]
Basically, since Chrome now support Greasemonkey scripts, you just have to have a good ad blocking script and adsweep is one.
I wonder what will be the future extension mecanism of Chrome but with Greasemonkey, there is something very usefull and integrated in the web pages we use. So this is definitely interesting.

I'm a relative newcomer to Adblock (imagine that - used FF for years without it. Yeah, yeah, hand in your geek card etc.), perhaps because I wasn't bugged very often by ads. Anyhow, I decided to try it, and while I noticed that it blocks some stuff I used to see occasionally earlier, it also seems to have rendered my browser less stable, requiring more frequent restarts and generally slowing down every operation.

I think editing the hosts file does have some major advantages over Adblock, no matter how stran

Or, if you don't want to maintain a HOSTS file yourself, but still don't want any other software, there's this excellent ad-server list [yoyo.org] which can be downloaded in all kinds of formats (yes, even as a HOSTS file). If you're REALLY lazy, you can use this link [yoyo.org] along with a 1 line shell script and a crontab entry (or windows scheduler or whatever it's called) to automate updating your HOSTS file.

When people say they want adblock and noscript and you say "just edit your hosts file" you sound like another fanboy making up excuses. When I was using adblock I had */ads/* and a bunch of others that are not even possible with a hosts file.

As for NoScript, I'm not a huge fan of it (its more of a pain then anything else

Wha? NoScript can occasionally be a mild hassle, but it basically automatically block all annoying ads automatically AND all that useless unrendered crap like google-analytics AND in practice it makes your browsing a hell of a lot more secure than separate processes.

I also find it funny you are willing to twiddle with NoScript but editing a host file is too much work for you

It is ages away from being as complicated as a hosts file, but whatever editing hosts is not that difficult, however, it doesn't really work as well as a javascript black/white list. Noscript does wonders, and well if you can't get used to it/use it effectively, that's not my problem. I still enjoy it and I would seriously, miss it if I had to run chrome instead of firefox.

e.g. heise.de, a German publisher for IT magazines, which also offers the best informed German language IT news and a very good online magazine on society and culture [heise.de], hosts all ads themselves. Blocking heise.de would mean also blocking one of the best sources for Germans on the net. Adblock (with a German blocklist), on the other hand, conveniently blocks all the ads and doesn't touch anything else. Impossible with a hosts file.

Yep, you can't love without all the Google data mining tools tracking everything your browser does.....well, some can't. Personally it's the main reason I won't be touching the official Google Chrome on ANY platform. At least an Open Source port can be built without all that shit in it.

Oh yeah, I echo the calls for an AdBlock and NoScript type functionality in Chrome.

Do you mean the stupid and annoying Googleupdate, that sits there. All the time. Running even when you aren't using any Google software? And that even when it runs on a schedule, will sit there all the time anyway, doing nothing?

its not in msconfig as its installed a service (they thought of that) even hijackthis wont kill it due to permissions (it runs as system) if its running it puts itself right back

to remove it you need tostart>run>services.mscfind google service in list, double click it and take note of the service nameit should be something like googleupdatesvc(randomcharacters)stop the service (if its running)then open a command prompt (in admin mode if you are on vista) and typesc delete "nameofgoogleservice"then go into controlpanel>scheduled tasksand delete the google job

and voila its not running anymore, then for full piece of mind delete the googleupdate exe in its folder.

As you can see, its just as malicious to remove as most spyware, so we (our company) treats it as such, the fact that its google[donoevil] means nothing to us as we can only judge by an applications behaviour

I've posted it before and I'll post it again (seems most people still don't know about it): there is a fork from the Chromium project that not only does away with all the "phoning home features" including the annoying background-lurking installer, it also allows for an ad-blocker (looking at the forums, several different ones are available apparently, though I'm using the hosts file myself):
Get it here [srware.net]

They also got a "portable" version that requires no installation and stores all settings in the Iron fo

It's only called "Chromium" because it's an unofficial build; once Google finally releases a GNU/Linux version it is expected that it will also be called Google Chrome. At least that's what the article implies.

You seem to think Chromium is to Chrome what Minefield is to Firefox (Can't that be represented as Chromium:Chrome::Minefield:Firefox?)
I am pretty sure that Chrome is more of a branded fork, like IceCat (Iceweasel?) is to Firefox.

I didn't read the article- but is this the WINE supported version or an actual x86 compiled native build for GNU/Linux they refer? Or is this something completely different altogether? Based on the few comments I actually read it sounds like this isn't Google's browser even.

Chromium is an open source browser project. Google Chrome is a browser from Google, based on the Chromium project. This is a build of Chromium. No versions of Google Chrome for Linux will exist until Google makes an official release.

As Google releases these betas, those capable keep up and push out a native QT (and therefore KDE) based "Google Chrome" browser. I hope this is not too much to ask for.

The Google devs are using GTK, the reason given was that the relevant people had GTK expertise already so they preferred it. The community might conceivably create a Qt version, but I doubt it: We already have great WebKit support in Qt, and Konqueror as well, and V8 isn't obviously much better than SquirrelFish Extreme.

On a side note, I wonder why they have to call it "Google Chrome" on Windows and "Chromium" on Linux.

The name is the same on both. Chrome is the full browser, which uses the Chromium open source library as its base. Chrome itself might contain non-open source components in theory, non-free

I want to like Chrome, really I do, and I applaud them for speeding up JavaScript, but they are completely ignoring the one feature developers love about Firefox: add-ons!

I actually switched to FF roughly two years ago, when I found out about Firebug and a few other creature comforts. Nowadays, the first thing I do on a new machine is install the 15-20 add-ons that make my job easier and my surfing more comfortable. I tweak the shit out of that browser, and yes it does bog it down a bit with all the excess code, but that's peanuts next to the time I save with all these finely-tuned add-ons. Even if I had just Firebug, WebDeveloper and GreaseMonkey, I could still do just about everything I want with the browser.

I don't know how Chrome works out for regular users, but as a web developer, Firefox is still the supreme hotness. I'd be more supportive if the Chrome devs just ditched their browser and offered the same functionality via Firefox mods (or code contributions). They could even replicate the Chrome UI in FF, for the many folks who like the de-cluttered style.

Google must be split on the idea of addons for Chrome. Without addons Firefox users wouldn't be blocking Google adverts, blocking Google's Analaytics etc at every turn. I don't doubt that this was a major factor in deciding to build their own browser, which won't allow Google's data mining / advertising machine to be blocked. Unfortunately for them, the cat is out of the bag for a lot of users who now know it's possible, and insist that the browser they use be able to do it. Firefox can with addons, Opera can by editing a text file but Google really must be in a quandry over letting Chrome users do it. If they don't adapt to the addon system they will only ever be a minority to Firefox and Opera, if they do then AdBlock and NoScript will appear very quickly. If they then try the Apple approach and ban anything which competes with (or in this case, blocks) their own stuff, they will not only get bad PR which affects the "do no evil" image they've carefully promoted but will push people who converted early to Chrome under the assumption that addons will appear sometime down the line and that these features will appear when they're ready. How many of those will then switch back to their previous browser of choice if they know advert and script blocking ain't gonna be allowed.

While addons are a simple way of blocking ads and spyscripts, they are
far from the only way to do it.

Even if firefox didn't have addons,
all it would take is a proxy filter to remove the ads and
spyscripts. The proxy can run locally on the same machine as your
browser, and you tell the browser to pass all the web page requests to
the proxy. For example, I use Polipo [jussieu.fr] to speed up web browsing, and of course there's the old squid [squid-cache.org] that's bundled with every distro.

I'd be more supportive if the Chrome devs just ditched their browser and offered the same functionality via Firefox mods (or code contributions). They could even replicate the Chrome UI in FF, for the many folks who like the de-cluttered style.

You obviously haven't the slightest clue about what makes Chrome such a revolutionary browser. Here, let me sum it up for you. Chrome has sandboxing features at every level of the application. Each tab runs in its own process in its own memory space, so if a tab crashes, the program as a whole remains stable. Each app within each tab also runs in its own process, so if Flash Player or Java crash, the tab as a whole remains stable. This memory handling nearly eliminates the possibility of memory leaks, becau

As a web developer myself who used to use firebug, Chrome has turned out to be by far the better tool. The javascript console is a whole lot better than firebug. When you are in Chrome, click the little page menu icon, and in the menu there is a flyout called "Developer". They have actually built web development tools into the browser, screw half-assed bodgey addons, Chrome is the ducks nuts when it comes to web development.

I hate using firefox now that I've become accustomed to Chrome, on any system of any spec firefox is just slow as a dog, far slower than IE7 even which is embarrassing. What really gets to me about firefox is the linux build is near unusable in its slowness. I have it on my xubuntu eee pc, and its just about worthless as a web browser, especially in that limited environment.

No user cares about the architecture unless if gives them actual benefits. Firefox addons undeniably give huge benefits to many users.

The only architectural feature of Chrome of note is separate processes per tab. But is that a benefit?

First of all, any crash is unacceptable, and I've been running beta firefox on a daily basis at work and the last time it crashed for me was several months ago. So this is basically no benefit. The only real benefit for stability is running flash in a separate process, which firefox already does with nspluginwrapper.

Now performance. Chrome can make better use of multiple processors, which is great, but it means if you have two tabs open with flash on your dual-core then all your other programs have to compete for resources instead of having an idle CPU to use. Or if you are single-core then you have twice as many procs competing for resources with everything else, making everything else more sluggish. Granted, those are bullshit reasons technically BUT what matter is only what users actually prefer and not what is technically 'best'. Users might prefer all their other apps to be snappy more than their tabs to multitask well.

Memory usage. Chrome can recover memory better when a tab closes, but it wastes more memory for a tab to be open (duplicated images, etc). And once there are ad-ons that need to coordinate among multiple processes, is memory going to explode with each tab? Uncertain. Remember that Java also uses the same concept of a separate process per 'thing' and look how well that works out when you have lots of them running at once.

Frankly, if you give people a 'taste test' between firefox with chromifox theme (makes it look like Chrome) and Chrome, I think you'll find the browser architecture, except to geek fanboys, is pretty low on the totem pole.

[[ the only architectural feature of Chrome of note is separate processes per tab. But is that a benefit? ]]Yes!! Because it feels more responsive thanks to its use of several process.. Plus when one webpage use too much CPU you can easily find which one does this (using the built in task manager) and avoid this website..

The biggest drawback of Chrome is that you cannot have Flash blocked by default currently.I'm using Opera now (switched during FF2 days as FF2 leaked like crazy), but I'll switch to Chrome

When you resize it, the text moves smoothly, the way old-fashioned Xlib apps used to do. My Firefox installation gets about two redraws a second.

Render speed seems to be decent, and it generally feels snappy in a way that Firefox doesn't.

However: this is in no way ready to be used as a browser, even if you're masochistic. No dialogue boxes, so no setting of options. No tab control; you always see the most recent tab, and there's no way of selecting another one. Rendering glitches; Slashdot won't render, for example (although this might be considered a feature). And it's unstable. Five minutes playing made it crash three times.

But I'm going to continue watching with great interest. I'd love to ditch Firefox.

I can't wait until its available for OS X. I switched from Safari 3 to Firefox 3 when FF3 first came out, but in the past few months I've been looking forward to either Chrome for OS X or Safari 4 coming out.

Firefox takes FOREVER to start up. Like 6-8 seconds. CS4 programs start faster than it. I'm sure this is mostly attributable to the 33,000+ site history I've built up since I installed it, in conjunction with the awesome bar (which I am apparently one of the few fans of). If its getting slow because of

To be fair, the Windows version of Firefox has great startup times. It's not half a second, but it's pretty good as far as Windows apps in general go. But only a cold install. Once you start downloading add-ons, Firefox slows down significantly. In particular, if you have a lot of Adblock filters, or several subscriptions, your startup time jumps quite a bit.

This could be the first this is happened in a long while.The little video on the download site touts "a cool new way to drag tabs out to get a side-by-side view". Look like they ripped that off directly from Windows 7.

I've got no complaints. It's a good idea that the Win7 folks had there, I think. Then again I wouldn't be surprised if TVVWM had it back in 1990. Actually what I'd really like to see borrowed from ancient X win window managers is the "maximize vertically" command. That was really useful.

Google makes it's money by selling online adds. Why would they make a browser giving you the tools to block those adds? They won't. They'll make a browser which gives them more control over your browsing experience, and you less. Hell, Chrome doesn't even let you block 3rd party cookies, because they don't want the 3rd party cookies they put on your computer to be blocked. Any browser google makes will always be limited by google's business model of selling online adds.

Chrome will never give me the control I want of my browsing experience, because that's not in google's interest. Other community developed versions like SRware might do it for me, if they give me the control I want, and block adds.

Allright, I decided to bite and put in the PPA repositories into my synaptic in Ubuntu Intrepid. Installed chromium-browser. Neither slashdot nor NY times loaded at all. Proceeded to remove the repository given that it was a daily build.
Not that you can blame them. When the browser stars, it tells you that it's pre-alpha and that it's gotten too much exposure, with too many people trying it out and expecting it to work.

I love firefox, I can only thing of ONE problem with it.Performance.That's it, functionally it does precisely everything I want it to do, EVERYTHING, the keyboard controls, undo close tab, the ad blocking, everything is how I could possibly want a browser.

The only thing I'd like is 5x the speed, I'm willing to throw hardware at the problem but I think it needs to support multiple cores first.I'd like to see it use disk cache far better (it simply doesn't 'feel' used based on the speed it works at) I'd like

Its open source. You can create your own fork if you want. Also the Mozilla Foundation gets most of their money these days from Google. Its nice to have companies, that make real money by providing real value, pay people to develop software.